Port Dou­glas grows in pop­u­lar­ity with Spirit

THE Reef Ma­rina at Port Dou­glas con­tin­ues to emerge as one of the chal­lengers to the cur­rent set of more tra­di­tional su­pery­acht des­ti­na­tions as the lat­est mo­tor yacht makes the sea­side town its home port. Ar­riv­ing last Thurs­day,

can en­ter­tain up to 12 guests and has five state­rooms.

Ex­tra fea­tures in­clude a spa, a large spa­cious sun deck de­signed for en­ter­tain­ing and state of the art AV equip­ment from top to bot­tom.

It has a per­ma­nent crew of seven based in Port Dou­glas.

For cap­tain Martin De­banks and his wife Jo, who is

full­time cor­don-bleu trained chef, it was “no hard­ship” choos­ing Port Dou­glas as its home port.

“We have lived in some of the most in­cred­i­ble places around the world, but the Trop­i­cal North has been home since the early 2000s,” he said.

“It was al­ways our dream to bring a char­ter of this cal­i­bre to the east coast of Aus­tralia and we were lucky enough to pick up in Mon­tene­gro last year.”

The Reef Ma­rina gen­eral man­ager Rob Cruz said there were now six ves­sels per­ma­nently berthed at the ma­rina, in ad­di­tion to ca­sual vis­it­ing su­pery­achts, in­ject­ing an es­ti­mated $9600 — $12,000 per ves­sel, per day into the lo­cal econ­omy.

“We knew there was a lot of po­ten­tial for growth, which is why the build­ing of a su­pery­acht hub at the The Reef Ma­rina has been a key part of our $5 mil­lion re­fur­bish­ment over the last three years,” he said.

Mr Cruz said Port Dou­glas was a world class des­ti­na­tion that had the very best to of­fer.

He be­lieved its ap­peal would only in­crease once the Ma­rina’s $100 mil­lion wa­ter­front re­de­vel­op­ment was com­pleted. Jedda is a 15-month-old cata­hola cross and loves to be with a fam­ily. She has a lot of en­ergy and loves liv­ing where there’s plenty of space for her to run and ex­plore.